Chasms in Connections: Byron Ending (in) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1 and 2
Author(s): Paul Elledge
Reviewed work(s):
Source: ELH, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 121-148
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030263 .
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CHASMS IN CONNECTIONS:
BYRON ENDING
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 1 AND 2
(IN)
BY PAUL ELLEDGE
Two years and twelve days after departing England for his continental tour, Lord Byron landed at Sheerness on 14 July 1811 bearing
the manuscript about to rocket him into international fame.' It tracks
the months of recurrent dislocation intrinsic to a pilgrimage that
enacted the chronic discontinuity of the poet's affinitive history. Just
over one-hundred lines into the new poem, a valedictory lyric by the
voyaging pilgrim sings a simulated indifference to his desertion of
family and friends, and foresees as his destination the desolated
terrain to which in fact its author returned.2 This essay explores
Byron's response to the devastation he in disembarking met, principally as textualized in stanzas added to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1
and 2 in August and October 1811. But these supplements, partially
driven by the deaths of the friends they covertly honor-John
Wingfield in 1 and John Edleston in 2-also materialize the poet's
apprehensions about reengaging a readership after his recklessly
undiscriminating English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had jarred
and piqued the British literary establishment in 1809. The stanzas in
question encrypt anxieties aroused by gaps in Byron's personal
landscape and inflamed by the imminence of a gap between poet and
manuscript-by the rift created with his abandonment of the Childe
to an uncertain audience. My subject, broadly, is Byron ending:
suffering, evading, disguising, denying, performing, and surviving
terminations; ending relationships, poems, relationships with poems
and their audiences; designing structures to accommodate and
facilitate the dissociative imperative that determines so much of his
verse as it disabled so many of his connections. More particularly, I
look at the complementary coincidence of fateful human with
necessary authorial separation in Byron's elaborated conclusions to
his cantos, whereby he converts a psychic deficiency into a textual
strength that ministers to the anxieties it inscribes. Among these,
ruptures not of his making actuate a Pilgrimage discourse that
nevertheless exploits them in the vexatious task of textual termination.
ELH 62 (1995) 121-148 © 1995 by The Johns HopkinsUniversityPress
Two testimonial stanzas (1.91-92) precede the deceptively conventional parting address to Byron's readership that formally concludes
canto 1 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.3 The collective circumstances
inspiring them realized, with horribly concentrated impact, the
vision of decimation ending Harold's "Good Night" song (CH, 1.118197), for they resonate with the grief that staggered Byron as he
learned, in Jobean succession, of the deaths of five intimates between July and October 1811, while preparing his new poem for the
press. Mrs. Byron died on 1 August at Newstead Abbey, before
reunion with her son who had lingered in London from mid-July.
News of the deaths of two schoolmates, Hargreaves Hanson, second
son of Byron's solicitor, at 23, and John Wingfield, at 20, "among my
juniors and favourites [at Harrow], whom I spoilt by indulgences"
(M, 21), reached Byron in late July. Charles Skinner Matthews, the
poet's high-spirited Cambridge companion, strangled among underwater weeds in the River Cam on 3 August. And by 10 October,
Byron knew that his beloved Cambridge chorister John Edleston was
dead of consumption. On 7 August he wrote in (an uncannily
proleptic Frankensteinian) anguish to Scrope Berdmore Davis:
Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in
this house: one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can
I say, or think, or do? My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment,
do come down to me, I want a friend. Matthews'slast letter was
written on Friday,-on
Saturday he was not ....
Come to me,
Scrope, I am almost desolate-left almost alone in the world."4
And on the 10th to John Cam Hobhouse:
My dwelling, you alreadyknow,is the House of Mourning, & I am
really so much bewildered with the different shocks I have
sustained, that I can hardly reduce myself to reason by the most
frivolous occupations. My poor J. Wingfield, my Mother, & and
your best friend, (surely not the worst ofmine) C[harles] S[kinner]
M[atthews] have disappeared in one little month since my return,
& without my seeing either, though I heard from All. (L, 2:69).
Hearing, Byron not only establishes a community of connections; as
metaphor, hearing, more nearly than reading, realizes the presence
only teased (and withheld) by epistolary texts, and of course renders
proportionately more painful the lamented dissociations and the
silences they signify.
122
Chasms in Connections
On the 22nd, Byron enrolls Frances Hodgson in the listening
fellowship:
You may have heard of the sudden death of my mother, and poor
Matthews, which, with that of Wingfield
.
. .has
made a sad
chasm in my connexions. Indeed the blows followed each other so
rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock, and though I do eat
and drink and talk, and even laugh, at times, yet I can hardly
persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince
me mournfully to the contrary.(L, 2:77)
And finally, on 7 September to Robert Charles Dallas:
In M** [Matthews] I have lost my 'guide, philosopher, and
friend'; in Wingfield a friend only, but one whom I could have
wished to have preceded in his long journey ... [Matthews] was
indeed an extraordinary man . . . To me he was much, to
Hobhouse every thing . . . I did not love quite so much as I
honoured him; I was indeed so sensible of his infinite superiority,
that though I did not envy, I stood in awe of it . . .I am quite
alone, as these long letters testify. (L, 2:93)
With relentlessly brutalizing irony, the rejections and desertions
Byron had earlier sought to displace or repress by the foreign tour
that became his Pilgrimage-among them, derisive reviews of Hours
of Idleness (1807), mnemonically reexperienced abandonment by the
beloved Mary Ann Chaworth-Musters, rebuffs by friends at Christmas and by a kinsman in the House of Lords, the deaths of two
Harrow classmates, and (of scarcely less moment to Byron) the death
of his prized dog Boatswain-seemed
to clone themselves in successors all irreversibly final. Homecoming excited flight. Coveted welcome wrenched into experienced repudiation as home emptied itself
at Byron's approach.
The traumatizing bereavements that greeted the poet, Jerome J.
McGann has proposed, fed the "Consciousness awaking to her woes"
(CH, 1.92.6) already foundational in the two cantos, and helped
determine Byron's October decision, once he had rallied from the
blitz of shattering news,
to make his personal losses assume a kind of climactic significance in his poem .... He created a dramatic fiction by means of
which the deaths appeared in the poem in a gradual succession,
culminating in the conclusion
of canto 2. . . .The
sense of
personal losses, lamented in some of the most moving passages of
the early cantos, climaxes the poet's education in woe.5
Paul Elledge
123
This observation and McGann's brief defense of it encourage me to
promote the argument for "personalization" from a different angle
by contextualizing Byron's eulogistic stanzas as the closural strategies
of a poet deeply anxious about reconnecting with an audience
literally and literarily given up in circumstances that challenged its
allegiances.
The stanzas at the end of canto 1 on John Wingfield commend the
Caledonian guard stationed in Coimbra, Portugal, who died there of
fever on 14 May 1811, two days before the battle of Albuera, the site
of which, some seventy miles to the southeast of Coimbra, Byron had
visited in July 1809 en route to Seville and Cadiz.6 This horrendous
battle, commemorated in 1.43-another added stanza-claimed nearly
fourteen thousand lives, 4,158 of them British in what, even so,
authorities judged a Pyrrhic victory for English forces under General
William Beresford over the invading French.' The London Times
from early June 1811 had trumpeted praise of the forces engaged in
"the glorious victory at Albuera ... Marshall Beresford speaks in the
highest terms of the incomparable conduct of every part of the
British army" (3 June 1811); and the next morning, in the same vein,
It is impossible by any description to enumerate every instance of
discipline and valour shewn on this severely contested day, but
never were troops that more valiantly or more gloriously maintained the honour of their respective countries. . .. It is impossible to do justice to the distinguished gallantryof the troops, but
every individual most nobly did his duty.... [O]ur dead ... were
lying, as they had fought, in ranks, and every wound was in the
front. (4 June 1811)
And again from The Times of 4 July, which reproduced a dispatch
from Wellington to the Earl of Liverpool: "I beg to draw your
Lordship's attention to the ability, the firmness and the gallantry
manifested by Marshall William Beresford throughout the transaction on which he has written. . . ." Beresford "well knows that every
officer and soldier deserves to be named in particular, the conduct of
all has been most valiant and noble, and never were given greater
proofs of brilliant British valour." And The Times prints Beresford's
very detailed account of the battle, prepared for Wellington, dated
Albuera, 16 May 1811:
It is with great pleasure I assure your Lordship, that the good and
gallant conduct of every corps, and of every person, was in
proportion to the opportunity that afforded for distinguishing
themselves. I know not an individual who did not do his duty. (4
June 1811)
124
Chasms in Connections
London papers, in short, gave extensive, even saturation coverage to
the Albuera conflict, and excited among readers warm pride in the
military glory earned by troops there deployed.8
But Byron's former Harrow classmate-annotatively
identified by
initials only, for reasons considered below-missed
this action and
whatever opportunity for honor it might have afforded him. The two
had known each other for ten years, Byron's note remarks, "the
better half of his life, and the happiest part of mine" (W, 2:189); and
he had celebrated their Harrow companionship in "Childish Recollections," a poem self-described as a "parting song" to the institution.
Lines 243-64 of that poem feature Wingfield as "Alonzo," "best and
dearest of my friends":
Our sports,our studies, and our souls were one;
Togetherwe impell'dthe flyingball ....
Togetherjoin'd in cricket'smanlytoil,
Or shar'dthe produce of the river'sspoil;
Or,plungingfrom the green, declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyantwatersbore;
In every element, unchang'd,the same,
All, all that brothersshould be, but the name.9
(W, 1:166)
Memory of such pleasures would have been freshened by Byron's
visit to Harrow within a week of his return to London, less than three
weeks before hearing of Wingfield's death only days after the deaths
of Mrs. Byron and Matthews. His note to the Pilgrimage stanzas
continues:
In the short space of one month I have lost her who gave me
being, and most of those who had made that being tolerable. To
me the lines of Young are no fiction"Insatiatearcher!could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain,
And thrice ere thrice yon moon had fill'd her horn."
I should have ventured a verse to the memory of the late Charles
Skinner Matthews, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge,were
not he too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind,
shown in the attainment of greater honours, against the ablest of
candidates, than those of any graduate on record at Cambridge,
have sufficiently established his fame on the spot where it was
acquired; while his softer qualities live in the recollection of
friends who loved him too well to envy his superiority.10 (W,
2:189)
Paul Elledge
125
Grief, modesty, consoling intertextualization, and deference to other
discourse for expression of an inarticulate sorrow all keynote these
reflections, whose origin in pain may be felt in their martial,
defensive stiffness and generality. But their effect, also apparent in
the epistolary quotations above, discloses a bias, a hierarchy in the
structure of Byron's mourning. To praise X while claiming Y above
praise subordinates X to Y, values Y more highly, and interrogates the
praise of X; and to elide Z altogether from this calculus ranks it third
by default or eliminates it as an object of grief. Byron may, of course,
mean to define grief for his mother and for Matthews as unutterable,
as unspeakably deep. But even so, to eulogize Wingfield while
positioning the cited others beyond the reach of suitable linguistic
representation necessarily depreciates the one saluted in the also
devalued medium. As we will momentarily see, the same explanation
may be adduced for this probably accidental diminishment of the
beloved comrade as for his screened identity in Byron's note.
Here is the first of the Wingfield stanzas:
And thou, my friend!since unavailingwoe
Burstsfrom my heart, and mingleswith the strainHad the swordlaid thee with the mightylow,
Pride might forbidev'n Friendshipto complain:
But thus unlaurel'dto descend in vain,
By all forgotten,save the lonely breast,
And mix unbleedingwith the boasted slain,
While Glorycrownsso manya meaner crest!
What hadst thou done to sink so peacefullyto rest?
(CH, 1.91)
From its opening affirmation of friendship, the stanza develops
through negative demonstration of Wingfield's paradoxical ennoblement by deficit: losing certain entitlements by the manner of his
death, his superiority evolves through disqualification. Unmighty,
unslain, unlaureled, almost unremembered, unbleeding, unboasted,
uncrowned, he fosters in the poet an "unavailing woe," and the
parallel impotency links victim and mourner. But if Wingfield's
exemption from the barbarity and glory of war redounds finally to his
credit, earning the peace he is said to enjoy, so too by that logic the
poet's woe achieves legitimacy as justifiable sorrow over irretrievable
loss. Byron thus retroactively invests his canto's denunciation of
warfare with an intensely personal gravity not by blaming war for his
friend's demise but by recording satisfaction in war having lost that
126
Chasms in Connections
privilege-in Wingfield's fateful immunity to martial death and the
misplaced pride and unmerited praise that it normally inspires."
Without disrespect to the poet's sincerity, however, we should
nevertheless ponder his adoption of the ironic mode for eulogistic
tribute. It buffers grief, of course, as the decompressing medium
through which factuality may submit to emotional management,
providing space for adjustment to the new psychic landscape-now
forever changed by a fissure-about
to be encountered without
mediation in Byron's next stanza: it defends against the intimacy it
also-defensively-suspects
of sentimentality precisely because so
fervently valued. But despite the ironically ennobling death by fever,
the stanza shows Wingfield diminished by it too, even belittled, in
losing an honor that, for all of Byron's pacifist leanings, would have
rendered him dearer and their association a source of greater pride.
This stanzaic paradox matches and endorses an occasional ambivalence towards war expressed in canto 1-it may, for example, liberate
as well as enslave-that permits Byron's concluding self-representation as a companion genuinely shaken who yet murmurs resentfully
over his mate's abandonment, his negative rhetoric registering offense at betrayal of friendship not merely by death but by an
inglorious, embarrassing one at that.'2 Wingfield becomes the first
textual focus of Byron's response to the shocking summer losses
precisely because, emotionally, he matters least, and because their
relationship, already massaged in "Childish Recollections," lends
itself to conventional treatment, with less risk than might accompany
tributes to the mother and to Matthews, in a traditionally sanctioned
mode familiar to the poet in Byron. But he must regret a demise that
robs him of a received instrument for grieving it, for eulogies are not
normally made on battlefield deaths by fever. That Byron's survivors
faced a similar dilemma thirteen years later eerily ironizes these
lines.
But what bearing have they on closure, and what do they reveal
about Byron in relationship? He added the Wingfield stanzas to the
poem around mid-August (W, 2:267), at about the same time that he
drafted a will, partly in response to Mrs. Byron's death, but also
urged, I suspect, by the two debilitating, emaciating bouts with
"fever" he himself had suffered while abroad.13 The appearance of
the new poem would represent Byron's first venture into print since
the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers shortly
before his 1809 departure-a parting (scatter)shot, if ever author
Paul Elledge
127
took one, against just about every "scribbler" of his day.14For three
and a half months, with embarkation ever "eminent" in a typically
extended Byronic leave-taking, the poet relished the commotion
wrought by his retaliative satire, not to mention its brisk sales, and
even the notoriety it conferred, for anonymous publication had not
concealed authorial identity. But the praise some readers had awarded
English Bards notwithstanding, as the Pilgrimage moved toward the
press Byron reckoned the cost of having pilloried the literary
establishment, no doubt recalling the stings of the Edinburgh's barbs
on his own thin skin. "You must be aware," he writes on 21 August
1811 to Dallas, his mediator with Murray,
that my plaguy Satire will bring the North and South Grubstreets
down on my 'Pilgrimage,' but nevertheless if Murray makes a
point of [assigning authorship], & you coincide with him, I will do
it daringly,so let it be entitled by 'the Author of E[ngl]ish Bards
and S[cot]ch R[eviewer]s,'
as though to spur the reprisal he foresees. Farther along in the same
letter, possibly projecting his anxieties onto his publisher, Byron
writes: "I fear Murray will be in a Scrape with the Orthodox, but I
cannot help it, though I wish well through it . . ." (L, 2:75-76).
Similarly to Augusta on 2 September 1811:
Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler,see what I am, &
what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and
what language I have been obliged to treat them with in their own
way;-all this comes of Authorship, but now I am in for it, and
shall be at war with Grubstreet. (L, 2:88)
And again to Dallas on 7 September 1811: "I know I have every thing
against me, angry poets and prejudices . . ." (L, 2:92). For two years
beyond the summons of parties assaulted by English Bards, Byron
expects Harold to reignite the smoldering embers of belletristic
antipathy toward him. He anticipates warfare, and prepares to do
battle "daringly."
He prepares, in other words, for combat to avoid the "unlaurel'd"
descent of the ingloriously fallen soldier/poet. I am suggesting that
Byron's consciousness of himself as a poet ending a segment of a
poem about to engage him with an aggrieved audience capable of
acclaiming, ignoring, or savaging him, in part determines the first of
the Wingfield stanzas and helps to account for its affective ambivalence. Situated like his friend in a battle zone, recently recovered
from physical illness but acutely aware of threats to literary health
128
Chasms in Connections
posed by political and journalistic foes, his own injured heart
bleeding for the "unbleeding" Wingfield, Byron launches Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage 1 and 2 as a second salvo to extinguish public
memory of Hours of Idleness and its critics, as well as of the excesses
of English Bards that answered them. But the new poem also seeks
to redeem the honor Byron sometimes felt he had compromised or
sacrificed by quitting the field in 1809 before challenges to the
charges of his satire could be flung down. His continental absence
equilibrates with Wingfield's fever as a disabling void, without
opportunity for ennobling conflict; successive editions of English
Bards only underscored authorial inaccessibility. That Byron's renown was ever in doubt now seems incredible enough, but with the
Pilgrimage still on his desk he had not yet awakened to find himself
famous; and an uneasiness about reception and perception, an
ambition for enwreathed recognition, subtextually alloy his expression of grief for the soldier fatefully denied the right and occasion to
earn through active conflict the admiration of the British public.
"But thus unlaural'd to descend in vain" (CH, 1.91.5; emphasis
added) records the doubled exposure anxiety of the poet postscripting his canto, the dread that its reception might wring another
sort of "unavailing woe" from his heart.
The fear of authorial oblivion ("By all forgotten") complements
the fear of anomalous positioning as the oddity, the aberration-with
intimations here of the behavioral repercussions and consequences
of Byron's lameness-among
publicly esteemed professionals whose
real worth is felt to merit honor less than his own ("mix unbleeding
with the boasted slain, / While Glory crowns so many a meaner
crest!" [CH, 1.91.7-8]). But that reminder of injustice provokes the
vexation and the warning of the stanza's concluding question: "What
hast thou done to sink so peacefully to rest?" This accusing interrogative, distancing poet from soldier, asks of Wingfield, first, "What
have you done to earn repose?" with the negative response implicit,
and second, "What, scandalously, have you done, what damage have
you inflicted on yourself, and what precedent established, by sinking
(in unlaureled descent) so peacefully, so passively and submissively,
to rest?" And the question identifies its author as one who will not go
thus gently. Within eulogic convention, the interrogative also asks
how its author can achieve the repose (ambiguously) granted his
subject, particularly, for Byron, in the face of menacing bookreviewers analogically linked to the Albuera hostilities and notoriously productive of Pyrrhic victories.'5 It serves subtle, combative
Paul Elledge
129
notice on censoring agencies and other adversaries, as Byron seals
his canto, that he is back, in aggressive, daring pursuit of the laurel
within reach.
Focused on Wingfield but conscious of the other deaths blighting
Byron's return to England, 1.92 develops dialectically from the
blurred appraisal of its predecessor.
Oh, knownthe earliest,and estemm'dthe most!
Dear to a heartwhere noughtwas left so dear!
Thoughto my hopeless days for ever lost,
In dreamsdeny me not to see thee here!
And Mornin secret shall renew the tear
Of Consciousnessawakingto her woes,
And Fancyhovero'er thy bloodlessbier,
Till my frailframereturnto whence it rose,
And mourn'dand mournerlie united in repose.
A manuscript revision points to the stanza's alternative emphases:
"Oh, known the earliest, and beloved the most," Byron alters to
"esteem'd the most." If his chiasmus gains by an enriched assonance,
the revision also shows passion cooling to admiration, intimacy to
reserve, perhaps in the aftermath of first grief. And so on throughout
the stanza: hopeless bereavement succeeds prized attachment to be
balanced by the wish-suspiciously framed in a double negative-for
reuniting resurrection dreams; lines 5-6 anticipate quotidian grief as
Wingfield becomes a metaphor for general dispossession and desertion, while line 7, linking authorial "Fancy" to the classmate's
"bloodless bier"-with Byron's adjective remembering the humble
end-foresees
their posthumous reassociation. Conventionally
enough, with stress dividing about evenly between recollected union
and separative sorrow, the stanza traces emotional passage from
dejected egocentrism through a self-renewing realization of the
magnitude of loss-sullying the dawn it accompanies-to
a reversal
of sorts in the dark consolation of a fancied reunion: Byron's last line
simply denies death's dissociative office by naming it unifier. If no
vision of a transfigured Wingfield comforts grief, neither does it
confirm separation. But located where it can have no human significance, the relationship Byron imagines refutes itself as healing
solace.16
This otherwise unremarkable stanza graphs a waffling appropriate
both to the mixed emotions of 1.91 and to the proximity of the
canto's conclusion. In Don Juan particularly, but elsewhere in the
canon as well, a separative event or commentary often segues into
130
Chasms in Connections
the termination of an installment (a canto) or of a poem as rehearsal
for closure, especially when the poet's resumption of relations with
his audience beyond it may appear problematic. The exercise practices disengagement and through displacement reduces separative
anxiety aroused by closure.17 A similar service might be expected of
1.92, whose dissociative moment as a preface to ending appears to
model Byron's praxis by providing a textual conduit for draining away
apprehensions of rupture. But 1.93 is of course a false ending, a
formally necessary break, perhaps, but as an artificial rhetorical
marker unlikely to produce separative alarm if so understood by its
architect. And yet it structures an end whose internal dynamics, like
its two-stanza prefixture, expose all the emotional awkwardness of,
say, dinner guests who, donning wraps at the door, sit down again to
resume conversation. Byron's simultaneous awareness of ending and
continuing, of closing without stopping, his consciousness of signing
a lie helps to explain the instability, the near affective indeterminateness of 1.91-93. For stress pressures the terminal stanza in greater
degree than its largely structural function would appear to warrant.
The still hot sting of reviewers' ink in Byron's blood stirs him, as he
affects to release the poem, to address to his "stern Critic" a question
and an imperative that stifle and confute the anticipated complaint
of "too much" by presenting canto 2 as a fait accompli. In other
words, in light of the completed "fytte" of the Pilgrimage now at
hand, indeed, already in hand, what seems an absurd hypothetical"Ye ... Shall find some tidings in a future page, / If he that rhymeth
now may scribble moe"-constitutes
a wounding shot at the critic
whose objection to the "moe" that registers the poet's scorn of such
a reproof is already obsolete: by implication, Byron finds this
adversary ethically censurable for premature judgment on the basis
of incomplete evidence.18 If for an instant uneasily suspended
between a sympathetic and censorious readership in a relational
dichotomy reminiscent of the tensions riddling Harold's song, at the
end of his stanza Byron adroitly escapes it through the historical
allusion linking his own with the "Grecian arts" next on the Pilgrim's
itinerary, a bold maneuver checking the critic's "barbarous hands"
that would quell the poetic inscription of those artifacts.
2
"Where are thy men of might?" canto 2 inquires of Athena in the
first of many reflections on faded grandeur, empiric ruin, and moral
dereliction that grimly march toward Byron's canto-closing medita-
Paul Elledge
131
tions on division and the particular losses of his men, parent, and
"more than friend" (CH, 2.96.6). It is a canto largely about discontinuity and disintegration, whose local occasions of valediction and
fracture anchor those subjects amid the discursiveness of travelogue
reportage before their climactic personal expression in 2.94-98. For
contextualizing purposes, I will glance at a few such moments before
focusing on the stanzas ending the unit.
Typically investing with subjective import his geographical and
historical surveys (of Gibraltar, Malta, Albania, Greece, Smyrna, and
Constantinople) and his metaphysical speculations (on, among other
topics, an afterlife, in this canto about the afterlives of civilizations,
estranged travelers, and bereaved survivors), Byron restates in his
ninth stanza the "vain" existence to which abandonment-now John
Edleston's-commits
him, and repeats from the Wingfield tribute
the imagery of' entwinement and dream reunion.19 His attack on
Lord Elgin (CH, 2.11-15) mourns the mutilation of relics on holy
ground, the dismembering violation of indivisible relationship, and
the amputation of heritage from its originating site: this divestment
is the violent political version of the dispossession that pilgrimage
enacts. Stanza 16, incidentally seconding Harold's attribution of
hypocrisy to those he left behind (CH, 1.174-77), borrows language
from canto 1 to contrast his earlier departure with his latest, from
Spain: "But Harold felt not as in other times, / And left without a sigh
the land of war and crimes" (CH, 2.16.8-9). In this apparent revision
of the prior text, "sighs" ventilated Harold's initial embarkation, their
inspiration-given the sweeping exclusions of 1.11-presumably the
"few dear objects" cited in 1.10 and here perhaps indirectly retrieved
as valuable connections: in short, these contradictory sentiments
toward land-bound intimates articulate the stress of the recapitulated abandoning act. Over against them stands the poet's more
forthright confession of farewell sorrow: "None are so desolate but
something dear, / Dearer than oneself, possesses or possess'd / A
thought, and claims the homage of a tear ... " (CH, 2.24.5-7). But
the pain of absence thus keenly felt and more movingly recorded in
the famous stanza defining solitude (CH, 2.26) produces its counterpoint in the lighter report of Harold's spurning of "Florence" on the
grounds of his unworthiness and, surprisingly, his former attachments ("check'd by every tie")-old,
neglected affiliations now
revived to excuse refusal of a new one (CH, 2.30.7).20 The whimsicality of Byron's prescription for successful seduction may be arguable;
I take it as a crude, epigrammatic summation of the cyclical associa132
Chasms in Connections
tional dynamic emerging in his verse: "Pique her and soothe in turn,
soon Passion crowns thy hopes"(CH, 2.34.9).
With an impatient "Away! Nor let me loiter in my song" that
discloses the poet's psychological equivalence to Harold's restlessness, 2.36 resumes the travelogue, "By pensive Sadness . . . led"
away, in the immediate case, from ruminations on the high wages of
"successful Passion" (CH, 2.35.6). Nearing Constantinople, Harold
"bade to Christian tongues a long adieu" (CH, 2.43.2); his farewell
initiates a major cultural alienation, with which his moral defection
within western civilization presciently corresponds, just as the poet's
freethinking skepticism inaugurating canto 2 conditions his arrival
on pagan soil. While the unexpectedly cultivated reception Harold
receives in Albania (CH, 2.66-72) ironizes his earlier reflections on
Christian civilization-or
perhaps this episode fantasizes Childe
Harold's reception among the barbarian critics expected to bludgeon
it-the wild song offered as entertainment by the marauding band
(CH, 2.649-92), a metaphor for voluntary corporate alienation, when
literally read as a call to arms constructs a collage of departures and
divisions themselves violent or performed in the service of violence.
For all of its rugged, exotic glamour, this song of dismantlement,
ironically the product of choric collaboration, extols bloodlust in
relentless contempt for life and relationship, and in foregrounding
battle over domestic and vocational routine ("the cave and the
chase") radicalizes Byron's rupturing motif. Finally, laying the foundation for his conclusion-indeed,
concluding the poem in its first
stage-Byron by a deft ambiguity collapses the distinction between
emotional and spatial division:
The partedbosom clings to wonted home,
If aughtthat'skindredcheer the welcome hearth;
He that is lonely hither let him roam,
And gaze complacenton congenialearth.
(CH, 2.92.1-4)
Whether we read "parted bosom" to mean one so internally riven
that it remains hearthside (or anyhow longs for home's healing
comforts); or as synecdoche for the wanderer mnemonically clutching a hearth graced by like-minded spirits; or, perhaps better, as the
fragmented bosom of an outcast pilgrim; this shattered, disenfranchised, physically and morally ruinous condition of the heart can find
congenial accommodation in a landscape similarly despoiled-as,
perhaps, can a poem featuring such wreckage to and among a
readership whose fractured identities and circumstances it analogi-
Paul Elledge
133
cally reflects. Albeit "consecrated" by its historical achievements,
fallen, modern Greece qualifies as one version of the desolation
Harold imagined as his destiny.
3
In late October 1811, roughly two and a half months after
"ending" canto 1 with 87-92, and at about the same time he wrote
1.93, the final stanza of the first segment, Byron adjoined six stanzas
to his second canto, five of them constituting what I here treat as his
farewell to the poem.21 In the first of these five (2.94), Byron reverses
the order of his canto 1 conclusion, now preceding personal lament
with provision for closure, as though preempting the absence about
to be announced by announcing his own-in effect, defensively
leaving before being left. But more interesting is his revisionary
appropriation of the earlier conclusion:
For thee, who thus in too protractedsong
Hast sooth'dthine idlesse with ingloriouslays,
Soon shall thy voice be lost amid the throng
Of louder minstrelsin these later days:
To such resign the strife for fadingbaysIll may such contest now the spiritmove
Which heeds nor keen reproachnor partialpraise;
Since cold each kinderheart that might approve,
And none are left to please when none are left to love.
(CH, 2.94)
If canto 1 closed on the combative poet poised for battle, this finds
him resigning the field, although to poets not critics. It concedes
longwindedness, exactly the charge spurned in 1.93, and admits to an
"idlesse" and an "inglorious" performance that recapitulate the
illness and undistinguished service of John Wingfield. For the
silence enjoined on the critic in 1.93, this stanza substitutes the
poet's expectation of his own among "louder minstrels," a figure that
reformulates those glory-crowned soldiers of "meaner crest" in the
Wingfield stanza. Whereas 1.91 contends for "bays" precisely against
an "unlaurel'd descent," the poet now drops out, forfeits the match,
declaring himself careless of judgment, declining the wreath also
denied Wingfield.
How should we understand this odd inversion of the argumentative structures ending canto 1? One might suppose it strategic, an
attempt to disarm criticism by dissembling indifference, and by
134
Chasms in Connections
exposing a personal wound to stay infliction of another professional
one. If the latter, then the maneuver repeats Byron's error in
pleading his minority as liability to readers of Hours of Idleness, a
text whose title, self- and verse-effacing Preface, and fate he almost
certainly remembers in the "idlesse" of 2.94.2.22 Or, more simply,
does Byron invite contradiction by so extravagant a statement of
(feigned) unconcern? Or is 2.94 repentance for pronouncing upon
Wingfield, a compensatory association of himself with his friend in
unremarkable fate? Or does it strike a defensively aloof posture
against expected assaults?
Throughout the canon, especially in Don Juan, Byron invents
(sometimes extreme) measures to avoid responsibility for various
kinds of terminations, often borrowing tactics from other authors to
accomplish the separations he regrets. Consistent with his practice
elsewhere is the adapted replication in 2.94 of a "closural" procedure
that ended nothing, that merely served the illusion of closure while
remaining untainted as a severing instrument. Byron's plundering of
his own expedients redeploys by echo the non-ending closure, and by
distancing the composing voice from its original articulation enables
the pretense that another, prior voice authorizes the ending now
underway. But the radical difference between the texts presented by
the composing and echoed voices sharply interrogates the illusion
and foregrounds the changed mind that introduces this conclusion.
My point is that the contrapuntal tension between 1.91-92 and 2.94
allows the poet more or less simultaneously to say, "This ending is
not by 'my' will or design (and yet is); '' do not leave (and yet do); ''
do not cause such pain as I now feel (and yet do)." Intertextual
structure declines responsibility for the separation linguistically
arranged.
And the bitter pain in the arrangement produces the capitulation
and relinquishment of 2.94. When in mid-August Byron added 1.9192 to his poem, he did not know of John Edleston's May death; by 10
October, he did, and 2.93-98 responds to that devastating news. The
passing of his mother, two schoolmates, and a friend had grieved him
dreadfully; but over Edleston's death, he despaired. On 10 October
he cries out to Francis Hodgson:
I heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any
of the preceding, of one whom I once loved more than I ever
loved a living thing, & one who I believe loved me to the last, yet
I had not a tear left for an event which five years ago would have
Paul Elledge
135
bowed me to the dust; still it sits heavy on my heart & calls back
what I wish to forget, in many a feverish dream. (L, 2:110)
Byron's adjective perhaps anxiously remembers Wingfield's affliction
and his own continental illnesses, as well as the hectic sway of an
illusory Edleston. The next day, he writes to Dallas:
I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very
dear to me in happier times. . . . It seems as though I were to
experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall
around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered.
(L, 2:110)
Then, with tortuously mixed feelings, he writes to Hobhouse on the
13th:
At present I am rather low, & don't know how to tell you the
reason-you remember E[dleston] at Cambridge-he is deadlast May-his sister sent me an account lately-now though I
never should have seen him again (& it is very proper that I
should not) I have been more affected than I should care to own
elsewhere; Death has been lately so occupied with every thing
that was mine, that the dissolution of the most remote connection
is like taking a crown from a Miser's last Guinea. (L, 2:114)
A week later, again to Hobhouse, he has grown obsessive:
The event I mentioned in my last has had an effect on me, I am
ashamed to think of, but there is no arguing on these points. I
could 'have better spared a better being.' Wherever I turn,
particularlyin this place [Cambridge], the idea goes with me, I
say all this at the risk of incurringyour contempt, but you cannot
despise me more than I do myself.-I am indeed very wretched,
& like all complaining persons I can't help telling you so. (22
October 1811; L, 2.117)23
Nor can he help telling the world: Byron pours into the poem the
anguish he claimed reluctance "to own elsewhere" than to Hobhouse.
This discreet and circumspect friend found the epistolary confession
unwelcome, for he regretted-and counselled Byron to regret-the
poet's earlier association with a man suspected of "indecency" in
England during the spring of 1810. And as Louis Crompton remarks,
Hobhouse might well have interpreted Byron's "grief as a form of
backsliding" into habits of desire and conduct unacceptable and
dangerous in Regency London.24 Although Byron knew he could
have had no future with Edleston, the death of the young man
touched him at the core and turned it tender, for it recalled the
136
Chasms in Connections
lyrical ideality of an intensely passionate but-as he always plausibly
protested-"pure" bonding of youthful males that he also knew he
would never know again. The letter from Edleston's sister announcing the death assured Byron of her brother's unaltered affection for
him. It must have cut deeply, this guarantee of the love of one now
beyond loving. And it proved relationally disempowering. It sapped
his energy, broke his will for affiliation. As ending, it facilita ted
ending, its force expediting dissociation on all fronts. Of course
Edleston became the determinant in death he might never have
been, again, in life; but the shock of his passing sufficiently reinforced Byron's suspicions of relationship itself to encourage his
withdrawal from the engagements to which he had verbally and, by
continuing his poem, vocationally, pledged himself at the end of
canto 1. The silence of Edleston portends and excuses his own, not
merely the end of his song but the end of his art; for the erasure of
Edleston forebodes the erasure of a poetic identity suspended,
without assurance of reactivation, by the end of the song. "I projected an additional canto when I was in Troad and Constantinople,"
Byron had written to Dallas a month before learning of Edleston's
death, "but under existing circumstances and sensations, I have
neither harp, 'heart nor voice' to proceed" (7 September 1811; L,
2:92)-except,
of course, to deplore his unimaginably worsened
circumstances and sickened sensations in October. Still, the medium
of that plaint, resigning "the strife for bays," contracts for and
initiates an aesthetic abandonment equivalent to the geographical,
moral and familial separations tracked in Harold's "Good Night."
And Byron's stated defenses of his retirement retaliate against his
abandoning others. I put the case more harshly than he does, but
when Byron writes, "Since cold each kinder heart that might approve, / And none are left to please when none are left to love" (CH,
2.94.8-9), he accuses a once beloved and trusted audience of exiting
the theatre with his harp and heart in hand, of thus muting the
singer-the absence and silence of that audience the warrants for his
own, a retribution in exact kind. The angry undertone in Byron's
lines, however, expresses not only separation grief; it probably
redirects to Edleston the poet's chagrin over reacting so ardently to
recollections of an association his self-appointed moral advisor had
persuaded him to believe shameful. But he was helpless in their grip.
John Edleston, then, becomes the locus in stanza 95 of the poet's
grief for and resentment of other separations because unique in his
capacity for unifying affection: "Thou too art gone, thou lov'd and
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137
lovely one! / Whom youth and youth's affection bound to me . . ."
(CH, 2.95.1-2).5 But the lines equivocate: the beloved "bound" is the
beloved "gone"; and whether Edleston's or Byron's "youth" and
"affection" accomplished the binding is undecidable (especially in
light of the poet's sense of agedness): perhaps both, or possibly
Byron is "youth" and Edleston "affection," or vice versa, and the
binding a mutual achievement. However stricken by his loss, Byron's
uneasiness about this relationship further destabilizes a tribute
already unsteady in its defining foundation. On the pivot of an
ontological question, gratitude for steadfastness swivels into a charge
of betrayalNor shrankfrom one albeit unworthythee.
What is my being? thou hast ceased to be!
Nor staidto welcome here thy wandererhome
(CH, 2.95.4-6)
-as though realization of spiritual interdependence translates into
memory of physical absence at the pier. This peevish shift from
bereavement to accusation arises from the perception that homecoming, in repairing spatial division, exacerbated its emotional
counterpart, and discovered reason for repenting return, resuming
the voyage: home dissolved, center collapsed, nothing urges an end
to wandering, which then becomes mandatory, and return meaningless. The vacancy thus predicted corresponds not only with the wish
to evacuate memory of Edlestonian deposits but with the stanza's
obsessive negativity-six semantic units accent the absence toposas well as with the authorial resignation of 2.94 and the imminence
of closure: emptiness behind, before, within.
But this insupportable vacuum irresistibly refills itself with
"thoughts now better far removed" (CH, 2.96.3), if nevertheless
stubbornly entertained.26 That "Sorrow ponders on the past / And
clings . . ." (CH, 2.96.2-3), witnesses its resistance to the separative
paradigm despite textual counsel to detach from memory and dismiss
it. Out of this relational discourse arises both tension and ambivalence, for Sorrow's tenacious grip on a ghost figures the willful
choice of disease over health; passionate opposition to rupture stands
against the conceded folly of preserving relationship. But nothing
hints at relinquishment either, for the passion profits by direction
toward a phenomenon unable to accept or reciprocate it, an absence
rehabilitated as temporally doomed shade: "Time shall tear thy
shadow from me last" (CH, 2.96.4). The grieving Byron mnemoni138
Chasms in Connections
cally recovers Edleston's phantom in the (comfortable?) confidence
that he will lose it again.27Unthreatening except through Hobhouse's
censure, unrecoverable, and unable to challenge imaginative reconstruction, Edleston rekindles an unsatisfiable desire.
But then it always was unsatisfiable, and that was its supreme
satisfaction. In short, the separation imagined in 2.95 approximately
recapitulates the Cantabrian association it remembers, a relationship
in which the (slight) physical distance maintained between partners
empowered the love dependent upon it. I accept Crompton's argument that with Edleston, Byron "achieved something like the palpitating restraint Socrates advocates in the Phaedrus, where the male
lovers . . . restrict the expression of their emotions to 'the sight, the
touch, the kiss, the embrace . .."28 Such amorous gestures-three of
them mentioned and the fourth implicit in Byron's elegy to Edleston,
"To Thyrza," composed two days after he learned of the death-selfsufficient and restricted, define sensuality as the relational dimension that signified more than it satisfied for Edleston and Byron.
Unconsummated passion remembered will almost certainly subordinate the sway of physical magnetism at the time. By its limited
expressive options, their stimulating physical play pointed toward its
own dispensability under the pressures of other priorities in that
"purity" of passion that Byron believed he and his friend shared.
Representing for them more than it materialized, flesh remained in
some part separate, subservient, even absent. Consequently, Byron
can recover in 2.96 an essence of the association, some distillation of
its "purity," precisely because it is unrestrained and undistracted by
physical presence. Removal, then, rewards by intensifying emotion
and by liberating the imagination to reconstruct as it will: the fond
heart, the quick fancy thrive on absence.29
The remainder of 2.96 expands upon the earlier metaphors of
clinging and tearing as the poet concedes valuables to a greedy and
Time-serving Death.30 Conferring a peculiar distinction upon him by
such efficient theft of "parent, friend, and now the more than
friend"-"Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast" (CH, 2.96.7)Death occupies the relational space it vacates. For it replaces
Edleston's ghost as addressee and becomes the betraying companion
whose welcome is a vacant house, and whose gifts are the Pilgrim's
transporting element somberly internalized, as waves of "grief with
grief continuing still to blend" (CH, 2.96.8) condemn him to an
oceanic wash of sorrow in perpetuity. Death's robbery inverts the
dynamics of Harold's departure (active leaving/passively left) and
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139
visits upon the poet-emotionally
identifiable with his wanderer-in
the midst of his departure, the desolation of abandonments made
more terrible by the impossibility of reunion and by the coincidence
of severance with homecoming.
4
In the face of such impoverishment, nothing evidently remains
but to "plunge again into the crowd" (not, notably, the waves), "And
follow all that Peace disdains to seek" (CH, 2.97.1-2), a resolve that
tacitly critiques the peaceful decline of Wingfield in 1.91. The lines
question that remedy rather than affirm it, however, and the remainder of the stanza continues in the interrogative mode, as though
reluctant to resume an enterprise experientially proved futile except
in the production of falsity:
Then must I plunge againinto the crowd,
And follow all that Peace disdainsto seek?
Where Revel calls, and Laughter,vainlyloud,
False to the heart, distortsthe hollow cheek,
To leave the flaggingspiritdoublyweak;
Still o'er the features,which perforcethey cheer,
To feign the pleasureor conceal the pique,
Smiles form the channel of a future tear,
Or raise the writhinglip with ill-dissembledsneer.
(CH, 2.97)31
The narrating poet, not Harold, considers taking this "plunge,"
which in prospect reconstitutes the Childe's initial situation and state
of mind: the Pilgrim's "revel and ungodly glee" (1.2.6), "joyless
reverie" (1.6.5), and "maddest mirthful mood" (1.8.1) reappear in
the "Revel ... and Laughter" awaiting the poet; the Childe's unshed
"sullen tear" (1.6.3) in Byron's predicted weeping; the "strange
pangs" flashing across Harold's brow (1.8.2) in the distorted, almost
disfigured countenance of the poet; the satiety of the Childe (1.4.7)
in the fatigue of the author; the Pilgrim's proud reserve (1.6.2, 4) in
the poet's dissembling pretense, and so on. This intertextual circularity serves a structurally enclosive purpose, of course, and may
transfer Harold's inanition and hopelessness to their creator. But
more to the point is Byron's preoccupation in this stanza with
deception and distortion.
Over and again he sounds the deformative notes: false laughter,
misshapen cheek, decrepit spirit, coerced cheer, feigned pleasure,
secret resentment, contorted lip, simulated sneer. Although the lines
140
Chasms in Connections
equivocate on whether "the crowd" excites the distortions and urges
the deceptions Byron catalogues, or itself manifests disfiguring
hypocrisies, in either or both cases his tropes befit their positioning
in the canto immediately before the onset of discomfort, confusion,
and "all that Peace disdains to seek." Vibrant in their overdetermination, Byron's topoi figure the anxiety of a man poised to
reenter "the crowd" but who, announcing intention, discloses in a
revealing verbal a wish to exchange for that arena the more compatible and democratizing oceanic element where his own congenital
disfigurement would neither handicap mobility nor provoke invasive
curiosity.
If the mature Byron appears to have accommodated and even
exploited his lameness with considerable physical and psychological
dexterity, the childhood cruelties and humiliations it earned him left
influential scars. Marchand comments on how "much bodily suffering and mental agony" attended a handicap "that probably did more
to shape his character than it will ever be possible to calculate."32
Although he never permitted the disability to sideline him from
boyish sports at Harrow-he took the field against Eton in the final
cricket match of 1805-it slowed him down, set him apart, except in
swimming, at which he excelled. And at least in his youth, it
encumbered, or was felt to encumber, his courtship: in a famous
episode doubted by Hobhouse, Moore reports Byron's pained anger
upon learning of Mary Chaworth's cutting disclaimer, "'Do you
suppose I could care any thing for that lame boy?'" (M, 28).
Marchand finds Byron blaming the clubfoot for his desertion by
Susan Vaughan, a Newstead servant: "'I do not blame her,' he told
Hodgson, 'but my own vanity in fancying such a thing as I am could
ever be beloved'"(L, 1:312). Such brutal rejection as Mary's, and
such careless abandonments as Susan's, could only inflame the
wounds inflicted by a mother who, again according to Moore citing
Byron's memoirs, "in one of her fits of passion, called him 'a lame
brat'" (M, 13), an epithet surely referenced, as Moore notes, at the
beginning of Byron's drama, The Deformed Transformed:
Bertha: Out, hunchback!
Arnold:
I was born so, mother.
(W,6:519)
On 22 May 1811, while waiting in Malta to sail for the home even
then emptying itself of friends, Byron set down "Four or Five
reasons in favor of a Change"; here is his fourth:
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141
A man who is lame of one leg is in a state of bodily inferiority
which increases with years and must render his old age more
eevish and intolerable. Besides in another existence I expect to
ave two if not four by way of compensation. (L, 1:273-74)
I retrace this familiar territory in order to argue that despite
Byron's admirable outward adaptation to the handicap, he still felt it
a stigma in 1811, especially in social negotiation. And while we
cannot imagine with any certainty how it affected him in individual
situations, perhaps we may fairly suppose that it always required a
decision, eventually instinctive and instantaneous, on whether and in
what degree to expose, disguise or conceal his disadvantage among
strangers-a judgment before entering a packed, fashionable salon,
for example, on his self-representation as sound or impaired body:
whether, in short, to be true or false. Further, simultaneously with
Byron's composition of the concluding stanzas of canto 2, he perpetrated two deceptions of some literary and psychological importance,
both involving Edleston. First, his elegy "To Thyrza" pretends to
address a female. Second, he denies to Dallas that Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage 2.9 and 2.95-96 refer "to the death of any male person,"
in effect claiming that a woman is their occasion and object (14
October 1811; L, 2:116). In what measure, if any, guilt over these
fictions emerges in the projections of dissimulation in 2.97 we
cannot know. But I suspect that distress over reexposure of a thrice
flawed and therefore triply vulnerable self-physically defective, and
prevaricating to conceal another felt blemish-may have helped to
produce the ascriptions of hypocrisy in 2.97 to the poet, or, if
displaced, to a public pressing the threshold of his imminent reentry
after a two-year absence that began with a defiant gesture flung in its
face.
But "the crowd" will encounter less the poet than the poem-or so
Byron might have thought before the poem, becoming the poet,
thrust the person into social prominence; the text, more than its
scribe, in the normal order of events, first risks victimization by
hostile reception. But in the highly politicized atmosphere of early
nineteenth-century reviewing, poem and poet were often one, as in
fact Byron, with the memory still rankling of Brougham's personalized attack upon Hours of Idleness invited by its personalized
Preface, assumes them to be in the defense of 2.97. Its placement,
tensions, ambiguities, and figurative overdetermination urge secondary interpretation of the stanza as Byron's distorted fantasy of
dreaded responses to his new poem. These responses he imagines to
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Chasms in Connections
be roughly analogous to the repudiations he has experienced in
homecoming; for the Pilgrimage as a publishing event is itself a
return in reconnecting with the public abandoned by the ending of
English Bards, and in explaining, through travelogue partly designed
to excuse, his absence. But successful explanation depends upon
receptive, perhaps impartial auditors; and Byron knew that any
except the blandest publication in a politically driven Regency
already "disdained" the path of Peace. What if, then, his two cantos
merely inspire laughter and mocking revelry, a levity false to the
spirit of his text? What if critical interpretation and representation
distort intention and so subvert, disempower his poem? What if it
earns only the lip-service of an artificial praise, an insincere pleasure
that transparently masks a dismissive sneer of genuine and merited
offense? What if, in a word, the poem fails, and the poet too, in this
effort at amiable relationship? Such anxieties as these vex 2.97 as
poet and poem, merging in consolidated self-defense, move toward a
reception rendered more uncertain by the reverberant silence around
them.33
And silence, of course, is not only the "worst of woes that wait on
age"; mute welcome may mute the poet, absence evacuate imagination:
What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stampsthe wrinkledeeper on the brow?
To view each lov'd one blotted from life'spage,
And be alone on earth,as I am now.
Before the Chastenerhumblylet me bow:
O'er heartsdividedand o'er hopes destroy'd,
Roll on, vain days!full recklessmayye flow,
Since Time hath reft what'ermy soul enjoy'd,
And with the ills of Eld mine earlieryears alloy'd.
(CH, 2.98)
The principal and consciously prominent discourse in this heavily
alliterative stanza grieves a premature solitude on a landscape
stripped of all "dear objects," in a separation process personally
threatening because occurring on a temporal continuum also conducting the poet to similar extinction without expectation of redemptive reunion. But behind it persists awareness of the impact of
absence upon authorship. In one perspective, the silence of the man
without contacts becomes the silence of the poet without audience,
and the blank page of life his own endpaper. But Byron's metaphors
respond with a paradoxical counter-argument. Consider the second
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143
and third lines quoted above: erasure engraves; elision imprints;
absence inscribes. Because and out of vacancy, substance emerges.
The textual utterance signifies separative sorrow; it is a wounded
response that semiotically rewrites and figures the departures, divisions and absences from which, in part, Byron has constructed his
canto, and conclusively validates that creative process. And it authorizes exit. His bow to a metonymic "Chastener," a grimly parodic
curtain call, acknowledges the space it emptied. The brokenness
registered in these lines feels authentic enough, but it may function
strategically in the way of the Wingfield stanzas of canto 1, by
pleading sufficient suffering. Himself dividing and bereft, and in
division bereaving others of what he paradoxically thus offers for
their soul's enjoyment, Byron withdraws in relational poverty and
despair. But embedded in his farewell is the complaint of an author
still smarting from the debasing ills wreaked upon him, first time
out, by the (literal and figurative) elders, as he thought them, of the
literary establishment. Their lesson, however, evidently took; for the
present valedictory virtually inverts the inciting offense of minority
status advanced in the Preface to Hours of Idleness, and selfadmittedly speaks in the accents of an aged man.
Vanderbilt University
NOTES
For biographical details, I rely throughout this essay on Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1957); Doris Langley Moore, Lord
Byron: Accounts Rendered (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Thomas Moore, The
Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1860), hereafter
cited parenthetically as M in text; and Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love:
Homophobia in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1985). William St. Clair provides instructive documentation and analysis of the sales
of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1 and 2 in "The Impact of Byron's Writings: An
Evaluative Approach" (Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford
[New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990], 1-25).
2 See my "Byron's Harold at Sea" Papers on Language & Literature 22 (1986):
154-64.
3 For the text of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I use Lord Byron: The Complete
Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986),
vol. 2; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by canto, stanza and line number,
and abbreviated CH; W indicates other references to McGann's edition, cited
parenthetically by volume and page number. References to the songs in Childe
Harold are by absolute canto line numbers.
4 Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1973-1982), 2:68-69; hereafter cited parenthetically in text by volume
and page number as L.
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Chasms in Connections
5 Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968),
109, 71. See also his "The Book of Byron and the Book of a World," in The Beauty
of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1985), 259-61.
6 See William A. Borst, Lord Byron's First Pilgrimage (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1948), 22-23.
7The
Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 7 vols.
(London: John Murray, 1898), 2:51n.
8 Byron, of course, would not have seen this coverage fresh from the press, but he
almost certainly heard-and heard with interest, given his on-site experience-talk
of the Albuera battle after his return on 14 July, for by then news from the front had
turned dire, and the Albuera victory would have provided a ready, encouraging
conversational antidote to such reports as the following one, which sweetens with
near denial its account of Allied misfortunes: "The general tenour of the great mass
of foreign intelligence continued in our paper this day . . . is of an unfavourable
nature. Its two prominent features are the fall-the honourable and glorious fallof Tarragona; and the retreat of Lord Wellington. The last, indeed, is not to be
esteemed a disaster till it shall appear to be such by its result and consequences,
which may, and probably will, prove of the same nature as the retreat from Almeida.
The fall of Tarragona is a serious and heavy affliction to the Spanish cause in that
quarter; but yet, as the phrase is, the place had sold itself dearly to its purchasers"
(The Times, 15 July 1811). Sharing if not stealing the journalistic spotlight on the
day following Byron's disembarkation was "a fresh accession of [His Majesty's]
disorder," a health concern serious enough to move the Queen's Council, meeting at
St. James's Palace, to summon to Windsor the prince regent and the duke of
Clarence, for attending physicians had concluded that "his Majesty's disorder had
increased" (The Times, 15 July 1811). In yet another sector of British life, then, the
returning Byron found instability, uncertainty, anxiety, threat.
9 In an earlier version, however, these lines honored Lord Clare, another Harrow
friend, a subsequent snub from whom provoked this bitter estimate from Byron to
Dallas as he prepared to sail in 1809: "Friendship! I do not believe I shall leave
behind me, yourself and your family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single
being who will care what becomes of me" (Marchand [note 1], 1:180). That the
"Recollections" lines can and did refer to more than one person suggests that in
commemorating one, Byron memorializes several, and enshrines the landscape of
their association.
10 See Edward Young, Night Thoughts: The Complaint, Night 1, lines 212-14.
Probably quoting from memory, Byron omits Young's emphasis, in italics on "one"
and the first "thrice." He also mispunctuates the passage, substituting a comma for
Young's semi-colon in line 213 and omitting a comma after the first "thrice" in line
214.
" See McCann, Fiery Dust (note 5): "Writing in England in 1811, Byron ... notes
gloomily that, since his visit to Spain in 1809, his worst fears for that country have
begun to materialize .... The melancholy events over which he had lamented earlier
are now seen to have had an even greater relevance than he had ever realized"
(110).
12 Borst historically, and McCann aesthetically, have studied the "inconsistencies"
of Byron's and Harold's unstable ideological positions in the opening cantos of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, particularly with respect to Spain and the Peninsular
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War. Borst asks, "What are we to make of a poet who exhorts the people of Spain to
deliver themselves [of French oppression] and then in almost the same breath
implies that all who engage in warfare are 'Battle's minions,' that they can do naught
but 'fertilise the field that each pretends to gain'" (Borst [note 6], 44, 45). Less
troubled by "inconsistencies" he believes functional, McCann notes that Byron's
stanzas on Spain "contain an elaborate complex of shifting emotions and attitudes"
of the sort I find compressed in the Wingfield eulogy. Despising war, Byron yet
favored Spanish revolution against Napoleonic usurpation; hating the military route
to honor, he yet admired heroism. The central paradox of the Wingfield stanzas
accords with McCann's claim that "war, martial glory, Spain, France, England all
weigh equally (or nearly so) in the balance of his [Byron's] mind" (McCann, Fiery
Dust, 49-50, 53).
13 See also his letter of 30 August to Hobhouse: "I have two stanzas in commemoration of W[ingfield] who died at Coimbra" (L, 2:84).
14 The poem appeared in March 1809, while Byron was still scheduled to embark
in May. Delays postponed his actual departure until 2 July, shortly before Murray
issued the second edition of English Bards that included new lines bidding "yet
once again adieu!" not merely to England but to authorship: "But should I back
return, no lettered rage / Shall drag my common-placebook on the stage .
Declaring himself "quite content," he "no more shall interpose / To stun mankind
with Poesy, or Prose" (quoted in Borst [note 6], xxii, from the second edition of
English Bards). Returning, after all, in 1811, poesy in hand, Byron revised the last
phrase to read, "To stun the public ear-at least with Prose."
15 For this observation, and for other insights silently incorporated, I am gratefully
indebted to my Vanderbilt colleague Mark Schoenfield, whose always informed and
imaginative commentaries on my manuscripts generously repay the effort required
to decipher them.
16 Mark Storey believes
1.92 "one of the most important stanzas in the entire
poem: the coldness of Harold is replaced by the genuine, puzzled loss of a dear
friend. Emotion is full, but held in check; the image of 'Fancy' hovering 'O'er thy
bloodless bier' inevitably recalls the comparable, but more fully evoked image in
The Giaour [lines 68-102], as though Byron finds in that poised moment of
bereavement a release and a relief from conflict" (Byron and the Eye of Appetite
[New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986], 119). The importance of the stanza is
indisputable, but its record of "relief" seems to me doubtful.
17 See, for example, Julia's valedictory letter at the end of Don Juan 1 and other
substitutive and delaying tactics there employed. My essays in Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988) and South Atlantic Review 56 (1991) deal with this feature, among
others, of Byronic closure.
18 See Jerome Christensen's ingenious examination of "fytte" and its importance in
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Lord Byron's Strength [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1993], 181-84).
19 The ninth stanza was added to the poem in October 1811 (W, 2:267).
20 McCann sees the "lighter report" as mock heroic in Fiery Dust (note 5), 54.
"Sweet Florence," the "new Calypso" (CH, 2.30.4-5), is Mrs. Constance Spenser
Smith, relations with whom Byron did not refuse during his stop at Malta. See (W,
2:287); Marchand (note 4), 1:199-201; and McCann, Fiery Dust, 54. In Peter
Manning's opinion, "Harold's refusal to join 'the lover's [Mrs. Smith's] whining
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Chasms in Connections
crew' hints that the lady is really a Circe" (Byron and His Fictions [Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1975], 33).
21 Byron's letter to Dallas of 25 October 1811 identifies the stanzas it includes as
"a conclusion to the whole poem" (L, 2:118).
22 From Byron's Preface to Hours of Idleness: "In submitting to the public eye the
following collection, I have not only to combat the difficulties that writers of verse
generally encounter, but, may incur the charge of presumption, for obtruding
myself on the world, when, without doubt, I might be, at my age, more usefully
employed. These productions are the fruits of the lighter hours of a young man, who
has lately completed his nineteenth year. As they bear the internal evidence of a
boyish mind, this is, perhaps, unnecessary information. Some few were written
during the disadvantage of illness, and depression of spirits. . . . This consideration,
though it cannot excite the voice of Praise, may at least arrest the arms of censure.
... To the dictates of young ambition, may be ascribed many actions more criminal
[than my poems], and equally absurd. To a few my own age, the contents may afford
amusement; I trust, they will, at least, be found harmless" (W, 1:32-34).
23 Comparison between this set of responses and those in August and September
reveals the greater impact upon Byron of Edleston's death than that of the others
then lamented. Gothic convention exercises a certain control over his expressions of
grief in the late summer; no literary convention-a
frequent Byronic constraint
against emotional excess-regulates
this October mourning, shapes, directs, or
contains its discursive representation. That Edleston's is the fifth death in a series
no doubt intensifies its horror; and the Edlestonian relationship is morally problematic in ways that the others, even with Matthews, are not. But the passion of the
bond, revived and perhaps exaggerated in the imagination of the bereaved, contributes substantially to the inchoate quality of Byron's articulated grief.
24 Crompton (note 1), 175.
25 In the "personal element" of this stanza, in its emphasis upon "loss and
departure," Storey (note 15) finds a reminder that "the poem is about parting, from
that very opening scene in canto 1 onwards; and parting, as it is put there [is
representative of] . . . Byronic paradox . .. " He goes on to suggest that the frequent
"'buts' and 'yets'" in Byron's text "are words that help to keep things apart, to
remind us of the distances resulting from departure" (96).
26 McGann notices that this stanza "deliberately recalls the conclusion to canto 1,
and even echoes a line from the Young passage he had quoted in his earlier note"
(McCann, Fiery Dust [note 5], 109).
27 Byron's "shall" agreeably alliterates with "shadow" in the just quoted line, but
also freights an imperative "must," in the sense of "necessarily and inescapably will."
28 Crompton (note 1), 105. See also Christensen's discussion of Byron's homosexual discourse and practice ([note 17], esp. 54-65). Christensen is right, I suspect,
in believing that Byron's initiation into genital homosexuality was postponed until
he arrived in Greece (376n).
29 If this reading of the Byron-Edleston relationship appears to resemble Donna
Julia's and Don Juan's elaborate rationalizations of their lust in the first canto of
Don Juan, the parallel may have a point. It seems to me possible that an ironic and
irreverent Byron, seven years removed from the immediacy of 1811 sorrow, might
have inscribed some of his own Edlestonian ideality in Juan's fatuous naivete, and
perhaps some of his own pronouncements on "purity" in Julia's delusive musings.
But the differences between John and Juan, and between the two poems and their
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147
authors, are multiple and vast. The Edleston relationship remained for Byron
unique, in a way sacred, beyond scoffing, even after and perhaps especially because
of the charges of indecency later brought against his friend; and if more sensuously
founded than Byron wished to believe or admit, even more precious for that reason,
and sacrosanct against Juanistic profanation.
30 Not incidentally, Byron's shortage of pocket-money
and huge indebtedness,
despite the inheritance, burdened his thought during the autumn of 1811.
31 Robert F. Gleckner refers "to Byron's total poetic career" the "two major
alternatives, which turn out to be no alternatives at all," proposed in this stanza"the feigned laughter and revelry of the satires so often punctuated by the 'illdissembled sneer' on the one hand, and on the other, the romantic poet's 'spirit
doubly weak' for every reach after the lost ideal, the fleeting smile that soon
trembles into tears" (Byron and the Ruins of Paradise [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1967], 87). McGann remarks that "the narrating poet's moods and
opinions [in 2.97] distinctly echo Harold's circumstances before the pilgrimage was
undertaken....
[H]ere his [the poet's] equilibrium is shaken, and we find him in a
psychological condition similar to Harold's at the beginning of the poem" (McCann,
Fiery Dust [note 5], 70-71).
32 The following summary of Byron's views of his lameness is based on Moore and
Marchand, as noted parenthetically; but see also (L, 1:36) and Marchand (note 1),
55-56, 67-69, 78, 89, 168, 273-74, 292, and 312.
33 Byron's concerns, despite the popular reception he would enjoy, were not
without foundation. Of the sixteen contemporaneous reviews of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimge 1 and 2 that I have read in The Romantics Reviewed (ed. Donald H.
Reiman, 9 vols. [New York: Garland, 1972], part B, vols. 1-5), eight may be called
generally favorable, four mixed, and four negative. A number of them comparatively
recall English Bards and its shocks to the British literary community. See also
Byron: The Critical Heritage, comp. Andrew Rutherford (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1970), 4-5, 35-51.
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